Visser's smile faded.
'I am a German officer,' he said bitterly.
'I do not lie!'
'The hell you don't,' Pryce snorted.
'Your lies fill this room with a disgusting stench.'
Visser took an angry step forward, then halted himself. He stared at
Phillip Pryce with unbridled hatred.
'We are leaving,' he said with barely restrained ferocity.
'We are leaving now!
This minute, wing commander!'
Pryce grabbed at Tommy once again.
'Tommy,' he whispered, 'this is not a coincidence! Nothing is what it seems!
Dig deeper! Save him, lad, save him! For more than ever, now, I believe Scott is innocent!'
Two German soldiers stepped into the room, reaching out for Pryce, ready to drag him from the bunk room. The wiry, frail Englishman faced them down, and shrugged his shoulders at them. Then he turned to Hugh and Tommy, and said, 'You're on your own now, boys. And remember, I'm counting on you to live through all this! Survive! Whatever happens!'
He turned back to the Germans.
'All right, Hauptmann,' he said with a sudden, exceedingly calm determination.
'I'm ready now. Do with me what you will.'
Visser nodded, signaled the squad to surround him, and without another word, Pryce was marched down the corridor and through the front door.
Tommy, Hugh, and the other British airmen of the hut raced after them, trailing after the old barrister, who marched with his shoulders stiffly back, his spine erect. He did not turn once as the odd procession crossed the assembly area. Nor did he hesitate as they passed through the gate, where steel-helmeted goons kept their weapons at the ready. Just beyond, adjacent to the commandant's barracks, there was a large, black Mercedes motorcar waiting, its engine running, a small plume of exhaust trailing from its rear pipes.
Visser grasped a door and held it open for the Englishman.
The Swiss Blucher quickly waddled around to the other side, and flung himself into the vehicle.
But Pryce paused for a single instant at the door to the motorcar, twisting around, and for a single, slow moment, stared back toward the camp, looking through the ubiquitous wire to where Tommy and Hugh stood helplessly watching his disappearance. Tommy saw him smile sadly, and raise his hand and make a small farewell wave, as if he were gesturing toward the waiting heavens, and then he gave a quick thumbs-up, and in the same motion, reached up and doffed his cap to all the British airmen gathered by the wire, with all the bravado of a man unafraid of any death, no matter how rough or lonely. Several of the airmen raised their voices to cheer, but this noise was cut short when one of the guards pushed Pryce roughly down into the backseat, and he disappeared from view.
With a roar, the car's engine accelerated. The tires spun in the dirt.
Raising a dust cloud behind and bouncing slightly on the rough roadway, it headed off in the direction of the line of tall trees and the forest.
Visser, too, watched the car depart. Then, the one-armed German turned slowly, victoriously, his face wearing a laugh that spoke of success.
He stared across toward Tommy and Hugh for several seconds, before he sharply turned on his heel and marched into the office building. The wooden door clacked shut behind him.
Tommy waited. A sudden, abrupt silence enclosed him and inwardly he filled with resignation and rage, unsure which emotion would gain prominence. He half-expected to hear a single cracking pistol report rising from the woods.
'Bloody hell,' Hugh said softly after a few moments had passed. Tommy half-pivoted and saw there were tears streaming down the hulking
Canadian's cheeks, and then realized that the same was true of his own.
'We're on our own, now, Yank,' Hugh added.
'Bloody fucking war. Bloody fucking goddamn fucking bloody fucking war. Why does everyone who's worth more than half a damn on this sodden earth have to die?' Hugh's voice cracked hard once, filled with an unrelenting sadness.
Tommy, who did not trust his own voice at that moment in the slightest, did not reply. He recognized, too, that he had absolutely no answer to this question.
Tommy trudged through the lengthening afternoon shadows, feeling the first intimations of the evening's chill fight past the remaining sunlight. He tried to force himself to think of home instead of
Phillip Pryce, tried to imagine Vermont in the early spring. He thought it was such a time of promise and expectation, after the harshness of winter. Each crocus that pushed itself through the damp and muddy soil, each bud that struggled to burst on the tip of its tree branch, held out hope.
In the spring, the rivers choked with the runoff from melting winter snows, and he remembered that Lydia especially had liked to bicycle to the edge of the Battenkill, or to a narrow slot on the Mettawee, both places that he would later work hard for rising trout in the summer evenings, and watch as white frothy water burst and bur bled and battled its way over the rocks. There was something invigorating in watching the sinuous muscularity of the water then; it had a life to it that spoke of better days to come.
He shook his head, sighing, the images of his home state distant and elusive. Almost every kriegie had some vision of home that they could rely upon, to conjure up in moments of despair and loneliness, a fantasy of the way things could be, if only they survived. But these familiar daydreams seemed suddenly unreachable to Tommy.
He stopped once, in the center of the assembly yard, and said out loud: 'He's dead by now.' He could envision Pryce's body lying prone in the woods, the false Swiss Blucher standing above him with his Luger pistol still smoking. Not since the moment he'd seen the Lovely Lydia slide beneath the Mediterranean waves, leaving him bobbing in his life vest alone on the surface of the sea, had he felt so utterly abandoned.
What he wanted to imagine was his home, his girl, and his future, but all that he could see were the dreary barracks of Stalag Luft Thirteen, the ever-present wire encircling him, and the recognition that his nightmares would now include a new ghost.
He smiled, for a moment, at the irony. In his imagination, he introduced his old captain from West Texas to Phillip Pryce. It was the only way, he thought right then, that he could prevent himself from breaking down and crying.
He thought that Phillip would be stiff and formal, at first, while the captain from West Texas would be gregarious, a little overblown, but engaging all the same with his boyishness and enthusiasm. He envisioned the two shaking hands and thought that it would probably take them both a short time to come to understand each other Phillip, of course, would complain that they spoke utterly different languages but that they would find much in each other to like, and it would not be long before they would be telling jokes and slapping one another on the back, instantly the best of friends.
As he rounded the corner, heading toward Hut 101, Tommy imagined the initial conversation between the two ghosts. It would have some hilarity to it, he thought, before the two dead men realized how much they had in common on this earth. He smiled briefly, bittersweet, not a smile that spoke of any lessening of the troubled sensation dogging him, but a smile that had at least a small amount of release within it.
It was right at that moment that he heard the first raised angry voice.
The anger was deep, impatient, and insistent, a cascade of fury and obscenities. And it took him no more than another second or two to recognize whose voice it was that was shouting although he couldn't quite make out all the words that were being bellowed.
He broke into a run, sprinting around the front of the barracks, and as the entranceway to Hut 101 came into view, he saw Lincoln Scott standing on the top step to the hut. In front of him were seventy-five to a hundred milling kriegies, all staring up at the black flier in a jostling, unsteady silence.
